20 WordPress plugins for easier sharing, better posting and a more powerful blog (PART 1) The 10 WordPress plugins we use to supercharge the Buffer blog (A note about WordPress plugins: They’re super great, which makes it easy to add a whole bunch without thinking of the ramifications. Here’s a helpful post from WP Engine about the effect that plugins can have on your site speed. Takeaway: Check the quality of the plugins you install.) 1. Scroll Triggered Box Probably our most-asked-about plugin is the one we use for our email capture slideup. Drumroll please … it’s Dreamgrow’s Scroll Triggered Box. The email capture box slides up from the bottom right-hand corner of the page whenever a visitor scrolls down 60 percent of the page’s height. If a visitor closes the box, they won’t see it again for 30 days. The box itself can be completely customized with whatever HTML text you want; we chose to sync it with our MailChimp list. And all these numbers and options can be completely customized—scroll percentage, days hidden, position, width, colors, and more. You can even choose where the box is visible, e.g. frontpage, posts,and/or pages. 2. Digg Digg There are a huge number of different plugins you can use to display social share buttons on your blog post. We’ve got a rooting interest in Digg Digg. Digg Digg was built by our Buffer engineers a couple years back, and it’s been a staple on the Buffer blog ever since. What we’ve found most helpful with Digg Digg integration is the flexibility of where you can place the share buttons: floating to the left or right of the article (see our Open blog), pinned to the top or bottom of a blog post (see this Buffer Social blog), or manually wherever you wish inside your theme. 3. WordPress SEO by Yoast Many SEO experts would recommend you grab an SEO plugin for your WordPress blog. Our go-to plugin is WordPress SEO by Yoast, which handles just about every element of SEO you could think of. The most direct impact of this plugin on us writers is the SEO box beneath every post. Here we can choose our keyword for the post—a great tactic for staying focused on a topic—and add a custom title and description. The plugin will also show you in bright green/red text how your post stacks up based on the keyword you’ve entered. 4. Hello Bar You’ve likely noticed the bright, orange bar welcoming you to the Buffer blog every morning. That’s the Hello Bar, an amazing tool for A/B testing different CTAs and power words—and a pretty great tool for collecting email addresses, too. Via HelloBar, we collect over 400 email addresses each week on the Buffer blog. Along with the slideup, those two sources account for over half of our new email signups each week. 5. Disqus comments One of the easiest (and prettiest) commenting systems we’ve found has been Disqus. The powerful Disqus system works right off your standard WordPress setup, allowing you to manage all comments neatly and quickly through the Disqus admin area or straight from the comments section on your blog. We’ve run into a spate of comment spam on some of our old blog posts recently, and turning off comments for individual posts is as simple as two clicks on a drop-down menu.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 04:41:34 +0000
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